Inno/Vention's Sweet Sixteen

The Inno/Vention competition is underway. Teams competing in the upcoming ProtoTest stage, could find themselves competing for a prize pool of more than $22,000 during DemoDay, the third and final stage, which will be kicking off on April 1. In addition to the monetary prizes, the teams selected to present at the final DemoDay event, to be held in Pfizer on April 25, will be vying for summer tenancy at the NYU-Poly incubators — and a chance to land on that list of success stories alongside Shimmerlik, Pellegrino and the rest. Here are the teams contending in two categories: hardware and software...

Hardware

Software

UrbanEden
Access to locally grown organic produce is limited, especially in cities; the return on investment for rooftop farms, greenwalls, and other urban gardens is too poor and required knowledge too great for these options to be considered solutions. We are designing an automated and modular aquaponic farming system that will enable any space, vertical or horizontal, to be easily and cost-effectively converted to a high-yield organic farm.Team: Gene Gurvich
Matthew LaRosa
LaJune McMillian

Trait
Trait is breaking down barriers to entry for biometric solutions for startups and developers everywhere. We are doing this by unifying and simplifying the ways one can tap into biometric technologies.Team: Pasha Riger
Dheeraj Erraballi
Conor Dawson

Carfion
Hydrogen systems such as fuel cells and electrolyzers currently use metal-based electrodes that are costly and extremely prone to fouling, significantly affecting availability and impacting performance over time. Our solution is to create a novel electrode material that uses specially processed carbon nanotubes instead of metals to increase longevity and performance while also decreasing cost and maintenance.

Athox
Sifting through thousands of resumes and conducting hundreds of interviews trying to find valuable employees to hire for a company is hard. Athox hopes to speed up the process by providing companies with a computerized pre-employment aptitude test and hiring system that self-improves over time, becoming more and more accurate.Team: Alban Preldakaj
Robert GodlewskiMentor: Fred Strauss

Turn-on the life of 1,300,000,000 people from Darkness to Light
Every fifth person in the world has no light in their houses. Our solution based on a bicycle driven generator will provide a reliable and affordable solution for solving this global problem.Team: Lakshmi Prasanna Channam
Julien Sandraz
Chitralekha GhoshMentor: Francisco De Leon

RecoveryVIEW
RecoveryVIEW is an innovative solution that will transform the way community members assist each other during the aftermath of a disaster, while at the same time generating and delivering invaluable real-time data to government agencies and relief organizations to achieve a more effective and timely response.Team: John Santiago
Jason DuBey
Sebastian OleszekMentor: Bharat Rao

Bot Factory
Problems: Making circuit boards requires expensive machinery, the customers have to wait long delivery times and have limited choice of material.
Solution: building a $2500 circuit board printer which offers a variety of features all in one boxTeam: Nicolas Vansnick
Bharat Jain
Carlos OspinaMentor: Mike Knox

SocialEffort
Charities have difficulty maintaining their volunteers. Why? Many volunteers say that the motivation to keep volunteering comes from a simple show of appreciation. SocialEffort is teaming up with businesses and charities so we can recognize volunteers and reward them for their acts of charity. We’re building mobile app designed to reward volunteers, promote charities, and help businesses.Team: Danielle Leong
Alim WilliamsMentor: Oded Nov

OptiCrete Logos
The problem is the inability to create transparent concrete with different colors and controlled patterns. My digital fabrication method can solve this problem.

Team: Stanislav RoslyakovMentor: Professor Weihua Jin

GardenXplore
We are solving the inconveniences that homeowners who want to design their own gardens and outdoor spaces encounter by providing a comprehensive do-it-yourself website, which includes features to upload a photo of an existing garden or yard, click-and-drag inventories of local nurseries into uploaded photos, access plant characteristics and maintenance requirements of the inventories chosen, and purchase the desired plants online. Our product eliminates the hassles of professional services for garden and lawn design being too expensive, researching plant materials taking too much time, finding the researched plants at the local nursery being nearly impossible, and plant maintenance information being overwhelming.

Team: Kayla Lekettey
Rakinur AlamMentor: Rob Morano

Ringing Finger
The Ringing Finger is a ring-type device which interfaces-with/monitors your important personal belongings. For example, when interfaced with your phone, the Ringing Finger allows the user to both feel and see incoming calls in an unobtrusive, but reliable manner -- a vibration of the ring, and/or subtle lights illuminating on the ring (per the users preferences).

Team: Ursula KonigesMentor: Vikram Kapila

Hanabi
Tickets to amusement parks and ski resorts are very expensive. Group rate tickets are much more affordable, but organizing a group is difficult. Hanabi is a crowdsourcing platform that helps users purchase group rate tickets without the hassle of having to find a group.Team: Jason LeeMentors: Dana Karwas, Liz McEnaney

SmartBand
SmartBand is a wearable emergency medical device where real-time biometric monitoring is coupled with automated emergency communication protocols. Changes in a user's vitals, indicating a state of duress, prompts SmartBand to automatically summon emergency responders for assistance.

Chelation Filter-> Ex Vivo Dynamics
There are over 45,000 patients in the U.S every year that suffer from the effects of blood transfusion iron overload. They must go on costly and potentially dangerous medication in order to survive. We invented a non-invasive dual filtration system that would potentially solve this issue once and for all.Team: Alan Perlstein
Ashlesha Muley
Xi Su
Yuqi Guo, Mentor: Dr Xi, Haung

6 degrees
In the market today, there is no real solution aimed at helping arm amputees and kids born with upper limb deficiency to use a computer or any other interactive gadgets that have made our lives much easier. We are using low cost, commercial available parts to create both an armband and a clip capable of sensing motion and transmitting the movement to electronic devices to allow individuals that would otherwise be incapable of using them full access to all their features.Team: Aryeh Katz
Miri Berger-Katz
Brian CairlMentor: Michael Knox

Surgery Ready Communications
Our aim is to implement wireless technologies within the operating room. There are hundreds of wires running all around an operating room which create a cluster of wires. This creates an unnecessary hazardous environment which we aim to solve. We want to create a secure network within an operating room which will transfer live real time information of the patient and control other necessary equipment.Team: Efe Alatan
Fahd Iqbal
Asad Ali
AboodMentors: Michael Knox, Peter Voltz